Hi InsaneJ,
I have a small job as web developper and realised I got a not in use 860 evo 256gb laying around, which I can sell to you for cheap. If i'm right you live in the netherlands aswell. I would also suggest to run the website on a cheap hosting service to make some space on the ssd's for ark and mc. Website hosting is really cheap atm. I can also host something for you for free if youre intrested. So contact me if you want anything,
Greetings Bram.

Thanks for your offer, Bram

Right now we have no shortage in disk storage. Recently I've upgraded our server with two 6TB SAS drives. In addition to four 300GB 10K SAS drives, two 256GB EVO PRO SSDs, six 3TB WD Red drives and a 1TB nvme SSD for caching we have plenty of space to put everything.

Compared to hosting ARK and heavily modded Minecraft servers, the web server doesn't use up a whole lot of resources. We upgraded our server to 128GB of RAM a short while ago. Right now that is sufficient to run all the servers we want.

All those figures combined add up to quite a large sum of money. But compared to having to rent servers, it's cheap. Also it's a bit of a hobby

Some of you may know about our crazy plans to setup another HappyDiggers server in the US. That plan seems to be going forward. Jiro bought my current 14core Xeon, motherboard and 64GB of RAM. This allowed me to buy the following parts to upgrade our current server with:

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X 12 core / 14 thread - CPU

€ 335,00

ASRock X399 TAICHI - Motherboard

€ 348,33

Noctua NH-U14S - CPU cooler

€ 79,95

Corsair RMx Series RM850x (2018) - power supply

€ 118,00

USB drive

€ 15,99

I put together these components along with 32GB of RAM and an old Nvidia Quadro card I had lying around. Unfortunately the Quadro shorted and let the smoke out. Yikes...

After that I removed it from the motherboard and booted it up. Oddly enough it displayed the all-OK post codes and the num lock LED on the keyboard seemed to turn on/off when pressing the num lock key. So it seems that apart from the Quadro the other hardware is fine.

I don't have any other graphics cards lying around to test with and I don't feel like taking one out of our HTPC. So I've bought an ATI-102-B17002(B) 256MB PCI-e x1 card for 2 euro. That's right. ATI. From way back before it was bought by AMD. Essentially all it has to do is display the BIOS and a VMWare terminal. If I could have found a 4MB non-3D card that fits in a PCI-e x1 slot I would have gotten that. But this card should do nicely

Once I get the 'new' graphics card I'll try installing VMWare and do some testing. If that all goes well I'll do the server upgrade after that. This involves removing the current motherboard and expansion cards from the server case and replacing it with the new parts. This shouldn't take too long. After that I'll have to do some work on VMWare to get all the VMs up and running again.

I won't send the parts to Jiro after that just yet. He asked me to wait until he can upgrade his Internet connection to allow for more upstream bandwidth. This means the current server will continue to run with 128GB of memory, but with a faster CPU.

I've installed VMWare ESXi on the USB drive and so far things are looking good. If all goes well I may upgrade the server somewhere this weekend. I'm not sure what day and time though. You'll know when everything is down. That's me upgrading the server

Sverf's server got an upgrade!

Yesterday Sverf and I upgraded Sverf's server. The plan was to replace the motherboard / CPU / RAM with new parts and to put in a fancy raid controller and two extra 3TB hard drives. The first part worked, the raid controller part not so much.

The 24-port Areca 1280ML raid controller we wanted to install seemed to be broken so we had to skip that step. That also meant that we couldn't change the system from running Xen virtualization to VMWare. After we had given up on the raid controller the rest of the upgrade went pretty smooth. Swapping the hardware was pretty easy and after that Sverf did some fancy Linux stuff which goes well beyond clicking next-next-finish in the Ubuntu graphical installer

The following hardware was installed:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600 CPU

€ 168,95

ASRock B450 Pro4 Motherboard

€ 86,90

32GB HyperX RAM

€ 275

Zotac ZT-71304-20L

€ 58,65

HP Intel Quad-port server network card

€ 70

Pics!

Spoiler!

AMD Ryzen 5 2600

ASRock B450 Pro4

HyperX RAM

Zotac ZT-71304-20L

HP Intel Quad-port server network card

Sverf's server currently hosts the HappyDiggers MC, Vanilla, Snapshot and FTB servers. Before the upgrade the FTB server which currently runs the HappyDigers AMP 4.x mod pack was sitting on a mean tick time of about 55~60ms. This means the server was slightly lagging and with the amount of mods in AMP that becomes very noticeable. Right now the FTB server has a tick time of about 20~30ms. This means performance has roughly doubled going from the Xeon to the Ryzen. Of course to be fair the Xeon was getting really old at this point as it was from the first generation Core series. Still, it's a nice upgrade

This afternoon one of the four 300GB 10K rpm SAS drives failed. These drives run in raid-5 so a single drive failure does not mean any data is lost. I've moved the VMs running on this array to the new 6TB SAS drives and replaced the faulty drive. The array is now rebuilding.

Nothing fancy. Nothing to worry about. Just another drive failure. The replacement cost about 50 euro.

Last night the server crashed. Turns out the Areca raid controller is slowly going bad. After restarting the server the controller wasn't recognized any longer. After another restart the card re-appeared.

As was announced on the front page I've removed 64GB of RAM from the server to be send to Jiro along with parts for the server he's building. When I started the server after that the Areca raid controller was gone from the system again. Another restart and it was back. Being able to reproduce that kind of behavior is never a good sign.

I've got back-ups of the complete VMs that run on the server but still it would suck if the raid controller would die completely before a replacement arrives. I've been looking for a second hand Areca controller. That's going to cost about 200 euro. For now I'm just going to hope that the controller will continue to function as we're not looking to be spending extra money on hobbies right now. We're in the process of moving and we've got quite a lot of expenses to cover in that regard. If it'll last a couple more months I'll be happy to replace it in the summer.

Anyway. Important thing to note is that the server got a big performance bump by taking out half the RAM. The reason for this is that one 64GB kit was rated for 2133MHz while the other is a 3000MHz kit which was running at 2133MHz. The new AMD CPUs benefit greatly from faster RAM which can't be said for Intel CPUs unfortunately. Right now the new TnFC server seems to be running about 25% faster than before. Or rather, it's using 25% less time per tick. Which is nice